HARARE – Zanu PF spokesman Christopher Mutsvangwa on Monday pooh-poohed businessman Kudakwashe Tagwirei’s reported plan to seek the party’s presidency, suggesting that the Sakunda Holdings founder was unelectable.
Mutsvangwa confirmed that the party had reviewed a recent recommendation by Harare province to co-opt Tagwirei into the central committee and decided he did not qualify.
With scornful disdain, Mutsvangwa said Tagwirei’s model of buying loyalty and support through splashing gifts including vehicles and cash was not sustainable.
Mutsvangwa told a news conference in Harare: “The constitution is very clear as to how you can become a central committee member. Harare province may have had aspirations for him to become a central committee member…
“The central committee was sitting and the tick box looked at for the eligibility of that person to be in the meeting. The recommendations of Harare were assessed as to whether they satisfy that eligibility but sadly for Harare province it wasn’t the case, their bid to support him wasn’t successful.
“Be that as it may, Zanu PF is a party of everybody including businesspeople. You can always go back and start again, and go through the processes and if you finally tick all the boxes you may find yourself a member of the central committee. But for the time being you don’t satisfy those conditions.
“In Zanu PF you must persevere, some of us started at 17 or 19 and we are still there. We may have aspired for higher office along the way but 40 years later we’re still occupying humble positions because the party has a way of doing things. If you love the party you don’t get discouraged, you return to the queue and who knows, next time you may be successful.”
Mutsvangwa suggested that having Tagwirei as the party’s candidate in the 2028 elections was a sure way to lose power – unless he can use his money to buy every voter.
“If you think you can buy (the presidency), try buying all the voters of Zimbabwe, and then we’ll know you’re the real deal,” Mutsvangwa said.
“Now if you try to use the electoral college who are representative of the party organs we can always wave the rule book against you. Alternatively we just deepen the electorate of Zanu PF. If you think you can buy the central committee we throw district committees in, and see if you can go to all corners of the country buying them. We can also throw in the branches, and see if your bag of cash could sustain that as you seek their votes. If that fails we can send you to the party cells.
“This is a party which has a mass organisation aspect, and when we go to elections we don’t vote by electoral colleges, we vote by the population of Zimbabwe. Zanu PF cannot afford to blink about appeal to popularity because if you do so you get false leaders who will lose elections in 2028 because elections are done by mass universal suffrage. So for sheer survival as a party we cannot afford to have electoral colleges of the party become substitutes for the mass popular vote which is the basis upon which we rule this country.
“Don’t attempt to use money and cars. If you buy the leadership of Harare province are you also going to go and buy Bulawayo province, Mutare, Mashonaland Central and so on?”
Tagwirei made his fortune from state contracts and has recently emerged as a potential successor to President Emmerson Mnangagwa, who is set to be replaced as leader at the Zanu PF congress in 2027 before his second and final term as the country’s president ends in 2028.
Mutsvangwa is reported to be also harbouring ambitions of leading the party but vice president Constantino Chiwenga is largely seen as the frontrunner.
Chiwenga has also not hidden his disdain for Tagwirei, likening him and other businessmen to zvigananda (a Shona word meaning parasites) who are feeding off the state through manipulating government procurement processes.
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